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Simple Machines Forum

Simple Machines Forum is a wonderful Open Source forum software project, written in PHP and using a MySQL backend. It is released under a BSD (3 clause) License. Development is handled by Simple Machines Forum development team.

It started out as a replacement for the Perl based YaBB SE forum project which had been wracked with causing resource allocation problems on many systems. The first version, a straight port from Perl to PHP was wracked with the same resource allocation problems. Around that time the owners of Yabb SE and original owners of SMF, Joseph Fung and Jeff Lewis, decided to convert to a new brand and name. The SMF project started as a small project yet slowly grew as it addressed efficiency problems, and security concerns. Although a rehaul of the YaBB SE code had been in development for several years the SMF project superseded it and popularity of SMF sparked a whole new rewrite of the code, with particular attention to security and performance in mind.

The first SMF release was SMF 1.0 Beta 1a took place on 30 September 2003. It was for Charter Members only.

Today SMF is one of the most popular Open Source forum packages out there.